It is standard practice with respect to mating connectors to provide means which position the connector halves so that the terminals therein are aligned for a proper mating engagement. It is common to provide pins, posts, and projections in one half made to fit within complementary apertures in the other half; both integrally molded with respect to the housings of the connector halves, or added as hardware. As a general rule, the features on connectors halves intended to assure proper mating work with respect to the connectors themselves and not with respect to mounting structures such as printed circuit boards or the like. This circumstance can create problems particularly wherein the two halves of connectors may come from different sources or may be utilized at different times in different ways with respect to fundamentally different packaging geometries.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a universal guide means which can be separately mounted to be freestanding on mounting structures to facilitate positioning and guiding for alignment the mating engagement of connector halves. It is a further object to provide a guide means facilitating mounting of a connector half on a mounting structure such as a printed circuit board in a simple and novel manner. It is final object to provide an improved guide means for intermating electrical and optical connectors to join cables to circuit boards.